Foreign Aid and Leadership Support in Informal International Institutions: Evidence from China–Africa Cooperation, 2000–2024

How are foreign aid and international leadership support related among participating states, and how is such support associated with subsequent aid allocation? This paper investigates a theorized feedback relationship between aid and leadership support in informal international organizations, focusing on China’s Forum on China–Africa Cooperation (FOCAC). Drawing on research on aid and influence and theories of international leadership, I argue that larger aid relationships raise the material stakes and political salience of cooperation, increasing recipient states’ incentives to reciprocate through stronger leadership-supportive representation. For the participation-to-aid relationship, the primary theoretical mechanism is symbolic reward. Rising powers may value such recognition and have incentives to reward it through subsequent aid, while other pathways may reinforce the same relationship. To capture leadership support, I construct an original dataset of African delegation participation in FOCAC meetings from 2000 to 2024 and develop a standardized measure based on delegation rank relative to meeting-specific diplomatic expectations. The results provide suggestive evidence consistent with both predicted relationships, but primarily through persistent between-country differences: countries embedded in larger Chinese aid relationships tend to provide stronger leadership-supportive representation, while countries that persistently provide stronger representation tend to receive more Chinese aid in subsequent periods. This between-country concentration is itself consistent with the theory: a feedback process iterated over two decades of persistent relationships should leave its principal footprint in durable cross-country differences rather than short-run adjustments. Because the patterns are nonetheless driven mainly by cross-country comparisons, they are best interpreted as descriptive of durable relationships rather than as identified causal effects or evidence that feedback dynamically unfolds within countries over time. This study extends the aid literature by documenting how foreign aid is associated not only with policy alignment but also with leadership recognition in informal institutions.

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